Dans ce texte inédit, extrait de l’ouvrage qu’il est en train de rédiger, Charles Taylor propose une analyse de la poétique romantique qui remonte à ses sources dans la Kabbale, la théorie de la signatura rerum et la philosophie de la Renaissance, mais qui en manifeste en même temps l’originalité, en tant que réponse au « désenchantement du monde » propre à la modernité. Il esquisse ainsi une compréhension du langage et de la fonction poétique qui place en son (...) centre sa dimension de révélation ou de dévoilement ( disclosure ), aboutissant à la conclusion que « la philosophie sérieuse ne peut pas se permettre d’ignorer l’intelligence poétique ». (shrink)

Analyzing the way computer technologies are used is crucial for their development. Such analyses make it possible to evaluate these technologies and enhance their evolution. The present article presents some ideas drawn from the development of a cooperation platform for elementary school children (10–11 years old). On the basis of an obvious ergonomic requirement, we worked on two other dimensions: cultural aspects and the teaching scenario. The goal was to set up observation situations and analyze the conversations produced during those (...) situations, in order to understand what using the platform meant to both the pupils and their teachers. (shrink)

On connaît de Charles Larmore (1950), philosophe moral américain contemporain, ses célèbres objections à John Rawls, mais peu de travaux se concentrent sur sa philosophie : son réalisme moral, sa réhabilitation partielle de l'idéal d'authenticité, sa version du libéralisme politique ou encore à sa théorie normativiste du moi. Ce sont ces différents aspects de sa pensée que les études contenues dans ce volume, premier ouvrage entièrement consacré à l'oeuvre de Charles Larmore, interrogent et mettent en perspective. Un essai (...) inédit du philosophe américain ainsi qu'un débat entre Charles Larmore et Alain Renaut autour de la controverse réalisme-idéalisme y figurent également, en guise de conclusion. (shrink)

Most of us came into ecology with memories of special personal places. A cliff top that Claude Monet might have painted. Allen as a youth spent his holidays on the Dorset Coast near Swanage; he can still smell the sea breeze of his childhood. Curtin grow up on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the dew of the grass and the bright green on a June morning remains vivid. The catching of reptiles and insects for him awakened a curiosity about (...) the natural world that has remained to this day. But once into the field there came the scholarship. With ever tighter grant monies, the pressure to publish takes so much of the fun out of it. A climate of unbridled careerism prevails and shows itself in the incremental state of the literature: little things to list on this year's activities report. There are now even predatory journals that cynically do not seriously review submissions, and only collect page charges. As journal editors have a desperate time getting reviews done by mature scholars, instead of a hand off to their overworked graduate students. So what is to be done - how can we bring the joy and importance of discovery back into it all? After all ecology is done by human beings. Mostly it is a personal mission, for what great ecologists write is frequently personal and life changing. So an undercurrent of this book is to remind and reveal the original purpose of science. Not professional advancement, but the genuine search for novel ideas and the imperative to share hard won insights and personal passions. (shrink)

Cet article cherche à cerner la manière dont Charles Taylor approfondit sa distinction entre deux grands paradigmes, désignatif et expressif, pour l’approche du langage, dans son ouvrage récent, The language animal. En prenant position en faveur des conceptions expressivistes du langage, d’inspiration romantique, qui prennent pour modèle l’idéalisme transcendantal kantien et l’idée selon laquelle toute langue particulière donne forme à notre expérience du monde, Taylor peut-il encore défendre le réalisme épistémologique qu’il avance dans Retrieving realism? Comment peut-on penser chez (...) lui l’articulation entre ces deux affirmations? (shrink)

Les dernières oeuvres de Diderot révèlent une écriture et une pensée morales plurielles, mettant en scène des points de vue complémentaires. Diderot réfléchit en outre, dans l'Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, à une véritable éthique de l'interprétation.

A common and enduring early modern intuition is that materialists reduce organisms in general and human beings in particular to automata. Wasn’t a famous book of the time entitled L’Homme-Machine? In fact, the machine is employed as an analogy, and there was a specifically materialist form of embodiment, in which the body is not reduced to an inanimate machine, but is conceived as an affective, flesh-and-blood entity. We discuss how mechanist and vitalist models of organism exist in a more complementary (...) relation than hitherto imagined, with conceptions of embodiment resulting from experimental physiology. From La Mettrie to Bernard, mechanism, body and embodiment are constantly overlapping, modifying and overdetermining one another; embodiment came to be scientifically addressed under the successive figures of vie organique and then milieu intérieur, thereby overcoming the often lamented divide between scientific image and living experience. (shrink)

There is a familiar opposition between a ‘Scientific Revolution’ ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a ‘vitalist’ reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism – if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, ‘iatromechanism’ should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines – or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the ‘Oxford Physiologists’. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly (...) heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the ‘anatomical’ outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call ‘vitalist’ since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility – understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought – in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some ‘vital force’ – which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Pound of Flesh: Lacan’s Reading of The Visible and the InvisibleCharles Shepherdson (bio)This cut in the signifying chain alone verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real.—Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject”This moment of cut is haunted by the form of a bloody scrap—the pound of flesh that life pays in order to turn it into the signifier of signifiers, which it is impossible to restore, (...) as such, to the imaginary body.—Lacan, “Direction of the Treatment”A philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.—Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible1. The Limit of LanguageWhen The Visible and the Invisible was published in 1964, Lacan was teaching for the first time at the École normale supérieure. In the fall of 1963, the previous semester, the French Society for Psychoanalysis had excluded Lacan from its list of approved training analysts, which also meant his rejection from the society founded by Freud himself, the International Psychoanalytic Association. 1 As a result, Lacan cancelled his seminar at Sainte-Anne [End Page 70] Hospital, where it had been running for ten years, and began teaching for the first time before a university audience (at the invitation of Fernand Braudel, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and other supporters who had arranged for him to continue his teaching). Philosophers like Jean Wahl and Jean Hyppolite had of course taken an interest in his work for many years, but this was the first time that participants in his seminar no longer needed the special credentials required to enter the psychiatric clinic at the teaching hospital. The seminar was now open to the public, was considerably larger than it had ever been, and its participants came mainly from the university. Lacan was now obliged to make a case for his work before the academic world.The seminar he had planned for that year was called Les noms-du-père (The Names-of-the-Father), but only one session took place. 2 When he moved from Sainte-Anne to the École normale, he offered a different course, which was published as Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, although it was originally entitled Les fondements de la psychanalyse (The Foundations of Psychoanalysis). 3 It is clear, therefore, that this seminar constitutes a new beginning of sorts, a return to fundamental principles. It also involves a concerted effort, on Lacan’s part, to prove himself.If we begin with these historical details, it is not because of their intrinsic importance, or because a theoretical text can be reduced to its historical milieu, but because Lacan’s remarks on The Visible and the Invisible can be grasped only if we recognize the specific concerns that occupied him during this course. 4Before we turn to that course, however, let us sketch its horizon more precisely. The ill-fated session from the Names-of-the-Father seminar, which has been published in the English (but not the French) edition of Television, contains an analysis of the “voice” which is very close to the account of the “gaze” that organizes his discussion of Merleau-Ponty [see Salecl and Zizek]. The session on the “voice” develops through a reading of the biblical account of Abraham and Isaac [see Derrida], which is in turn elaborated by reference to Caravaggio’s depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling—the entire session providing a brief summary of Lacan’s course on anxiety from the previous semester (the unpublished Seminar X: L’angoisse, 1962–63), in which Heidegger is never far away. 5 The context for his treatment of Merleau-Ponty is therefore extremely complex and overdetermined, opening in many directions, but at the same time it is extremely precise, in the sense that Lacan’s purpose in exploring these materials is not primarily philosophical, but concerns the development of a fairly narrow and technical point within psychoanalytic theory, namely, the problem of the drive. 6 [End Page 71]We thus have an initial orientation: as objects of the drive, the “voice” and the “gaze” are not properties of the subject (the... (shrink)

I argue that hopes and claims about the liberating power of liberal education are typically exaggerated, naive and wrong. Reflecting upon and borrowing terms from Jim Shelton's essay on "The Subversive Nature of Liberal Education," I use the work of Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron to argue that social education—training in efficient and productive consumeristic life—absorbs, muffles and domesticates any radical content liberal arts education may manage to provide. As with virtually all education, liberal education (...) conserves the society from which it emerges. (shrink)

Research in modern biology has largely been developed according to two main ways of inquiry, as they were outlined by Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard. Each stands for a specific approach to the living corresponding to two different methodological rules: the principle of natural selection and the principle of causation.

The aim of this paper is to explain why, while Charles Darwin was well recognized as a scientific leader of his time, Claude Bernard never really regarded Darwinism as a scientific theory. The lukewarm reception of Darwin at the Académie des Sciences of Paris and his nomination to a chair only after 8 years contrasts with his prominence, and Bernard’s attitude towards Darwin’s theory of species evolution belongs to this French context. Yet we argue that Bernard rejects the (...) scientific value of Darwinian principles mainly for epistemological reasons. Like Darwin, Bernard was interested in hereditary processes, and planned to conduct experiments on these processes that could lead to species transformation. But the potential creation of new forms of life would not vindicate Darwinism since biologists can only explain the origin of morphotypes and morphological laws by the means of untestable analogies. Because it can be the object neither of experiments nor of any empirical observation, phylogeny remains out of science’s scope. Around 1878 Bernard foresaw a new general physiology based on the study of protoplasm, which he saw as the agent of all basic living phenomena. We will analyze why Bernard regarded Darwinism as part of metaphysics, yet still referred to Darwinians in his latter works in 1878. Basically, the absence of a scientific reception of Darwinism in Bernard's work should not obscure its philosophical reception, which highlights the main principles of Bernard’s epistemology. (shrink)